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Originally Posted by
gbaji
this idea that a non-asian looking person can't possibly reflect or represent asian influences and culture
A non-Asian person can explore and write Asian-influenced stories. I'm pretty sure either most or all of the
Avatar: The Last Airbender showrunners and writers were non-Asian, yet their creation gets a lot of praise from Asian-American audiences (at least as far as I can tell, the majority of criticism seems positive).
However, A:TLA also incorporated East Asian philosophy and cultural expectations. Zuko's fixation on regaining his honor, Aang's commitment to pacifism. Elements of spirituality that I probably shouldn't go into on this forum. These are topics that aren't as important to Western audiences because of cultural norms, but they got the focus in this show. The world didn't just have a veneer of visual Asian styles -- its storytelling was informed by it.
Firefly never had that for me. All of the stories and conflict feel very comfortably Western: rebelling against authority, prioritizing personal freedoms, the mercenary "cowboy" plot structure where they wander from town to town. All very familiar Western values and concepts.
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The point of their future blended culture is that "folks that look exactly like people in modern America will adopt and use asian cultural influences in their day to day lives, and think nothing of it, and it having nothing to do with their ethnic appearance or backround". By *not* putting Asian looking actors on the screen, they succeed at this. If they had put Asian looking actors in prominent positions on the screen, it would have stepped on the very message they were trying to get across.
This is a very weird claim to me. I agree that it's cool to see non-Asians interacting with Asian influences and not making a big deal out of it, but I don't see how adding Asian actors would cheapen that. You'd get
more of that "casually multicultural" thing you're going for: say, for example, that Mal stays Caucasian and his old war buddy from the second Saffron episode is cast as Asian, and they chat amicably while switching between English and Mandarin like a lot of multilingual speakers do. If anything it would make the multicultural blending more apparent.
And in case you say that friendships don't count or that having it be an old war buddy somehow cheapens it, well, you can do the same with a random town's mayor, or an antagonist, or another member of the crew. Mal getting snarky in English with one member of the crew, then turning to another character to talk business in Mandarin like it's nothing, then turning back to continue the conversation in English -- that's more multicultural than what we got, while being just as nonchalant.
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Again. Is it only possible to show Asian culture if we include ethnically Asian actors? I may be getting your complaint wrong, but it seems like whenever we get down to details, it's not the cultural aspects that are missing and you are complaining about, but the literal "faces" of the actors on the screen.
It's both. I already talked about the cultural aspects above when mentioning Avatar (and earlier upthread, multiple times).
Firefly is a Western show, with Western values. I can't name an influence it takes from East Asian philosophy, history, or cultural expectations, beyond superficial elements like names, cuisine, and translated slang swear words.
As for the other point, about "faces:"
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at every turn it seems as though you are saying "only asian actors can portray asian culture".
I'm of the opinion that only Asian actors can portray Asian
characters, if you're going for visual realism. And the lore of Firefly is that "half of the 'Verse's colonists were from China." The other half of the colonists were American, and we see plenty of Caucasian and African-American people in the cast that supports
that half of the claim. So where's the Chinese half of the gene pool? Certainly not on display in the core cast, or on any of the outer rim worlds, or even on Ariel which is a centralized Alliance planet.
Sure, you could technically tell a story about Asian influences in a Western world. I suggested one such story upthread (e.g. China and America set out for the new system, but due to a "civil war" most of the survivors were American, piloting Chinese ships). But that's not the backstory of Firefly. Firefly's world claims to be half Asian in its
ethnicity. So why does it
look like only Americans survived the jump?
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My point is that you are not the only person who makes this association. The same association you are making that "asian actors missing means that asian culture is missing" will force "asian actor" to represent "asian culture" on the show, once cast. You *can* fight against this, but it's going to be a freaking uphill battle to do so, and you will come under constant pressure to "comply" with the stereotypes.
I've seen this argument before. "It's hard to include non-Western ethnicities, and we might mess it up, so it's better to avoid the issue entirely." I encourage you to let go of this mentality. Stereotypes are not inevitable. It's always worth trying for representation if that's the story you want to tell.
One of the advantages of including Asian writers and actors in your Asian-inspired world is that
they will be able to tell you what feels like representation to them and what feels like stereotype. In fact, I would make the
outrageous claim that an Asian audience is a better judge of whether they're being stereotyped than a non-Asian creator. You will get a range of perspectives and opinions, and you shouldn't make one person speak on behalf of their entire culture. But even one voice from the culture/ethnicity you're depicting is better than zero.